I Never Stopped Loving You
by Sapphire Sunrise
Summary: One-shot, "T" for character suicide, reference to 'relations,' and super angst. When somebody close to Ichigo disappears for good and he has to face the truth, he feels lost and unsure of where he'll be going next. Ichigo x Ishida


"Quincy Never Dies" (Original Title) - (Ichigo x Ishida) Rated "T" for character suicide, a reference or two to sexual relations, and an implied suicide-to-come. :D

Hello there once again, my readers! x3 Here's a bit of a depressing one-shot for you. Sorry. It just kind of came into my head for some stupid reason, I guess.

**Disclaimer**: I do not own Bleach or any of its characters. That wonderful right is for Tite Kubo, a man who seems to have a knack for creating sexy and easy-to-gay-up (male) characters. I love him for that, quite frankly.

* * *

Thunderstorms. They had bothered him before, with the pounding beat of the heavy drops upon darkened pavement and drowning grass. When the sky lit up in select patterns with the flash of lightning and the growling anger of the thunder followed, he shivered. Always, it always made him shiver...

_This day was no different._

A drenched, listless Kurosaki Ichigo stared up at the roaring storm that covered up what _had _been a fairly cheerful-looking afternoon. His hair clung to his scalp; his bangs stuck to his forehead. There were a few times where he had tried to wipe them away, but it proved to be useless, considering that he was simply standing there, watching the rain. Hands shoved in his pockets, he ran his fingers over a stolen entity that he had crammed hastily into his right suit pocket before coming here.

_How he hated this outfit._

It was jet black, both his collared shirt and his pressed, stiff suit. The azure-colored tie adorning his neck felt far too tight, although he pondered if that was just a sensation caused by the clenched feeling in his chest. He brought his left hand from his pocket and absently traced a line down the center of the bothersome neck attire.

His amber eyes scanned the close-reaching horizon around him. He could see not much farther than the pine trees that had enclosed the parking lot of the depressing, old building he was visiting. He was snapped out of his thoughts by a deep voice from behind him. The teenager had been so lost and distracted that he hadn't sensed anybody coming whatsoever.

"What are you doing here, _Kurosaki_?" it asked somewhat condescendingly.

The orange-haired shinigami sighed and allowed his eyes to slip halfway closed before he whipped around. Glancing up, he stared into the pale face and dark eyes of Ishida's father, Ryūken. "I'm an acquaintance, am I not?" he answered in a surprisingly quiet voice. It almost bordered upon a hiss.

The middle-aged doctor snorted at him and turned away, starting to walk back inside. "Right. Whatever you say, boy," he sneered, the creaky, cherry door banging shut in an ominous-sounding way. Ichigo tried to find the irony in that, only because he felt that there was nothing left that he could even _try_ to consider ominous.

He hated the feeling of his locks clinging to his head in wet droves, but he didn't want to go back inside. The only thing that awaited him in there was people to comfort even though he secretly wanted the comfort to come his own way. He had received plenty of the hugs and kisses and uncaring apologizes at his mother's funeral, after all; why couldn't he get it here?

That's right. He forgot that nobody had even known that they really hadn't been the enemies that everybody had seen them as. Bitter rivals at the worst, passionate lovers at the best.

_Not that anybody had been allowed to know. Nobody was ready to know, or maybe they just hadn't been ready to tell. _

The teenager let out a deep sigh as he desperately tried to strangle a cry in the back of his throat. One thing that he refused to do here was cry. "Why did it have to be like this?" he muttered to himself, bringing that free left hand up over his eyes that were daring to water.

It had been happening so slowly. A tortuously slow and desperate process. Ichigo remembered telling him so many times to eat and take care of himself better and, for lack of being polite, just to stop being such a puss. What had bothered him the most is that he never, and never would, know what had caused it to happen.

_"Just leave me _alone_, Kurosaki! I don't _need_ you to tell me how to live, and I certainly don't _need_ you worrying about me! Just go! I don't _want_ you anymore!"_ the seething voice played over and over in his head so many times over the past few days. It threatened to drive the young substitute soul reaper to the brink of insanity. Even now, he felt like he was falling there faster and faster. This was worse that overcoming the Hollow inside of himself. Gravity was pulling him down to the pit that he dared to say that his _acquaintance_ had buried himself in.

Ichigo's ears perked at the sound of the door behind him; this time he was aware enough to notice. "Please, Ishida-sama, just leave me alone," he demanded carefully, not even looking to see who it was. However, he jumped when he felt a familiar hand on his shoulder. "O-Oh… Hi, Dad."

"Son, you shouldn't be standing out here in the rain. You'll get sick like this," his normally cheerful father replied in a monotone. He tightened his grip on the boy's shoulder and gave him a gentle shake.

Although Ichigo had technically wanted to be left alone, he was silently glad that his dad had insisted on coming with him to this awful place. "The rain kind of reminds me of him," he mumbled, his face slightly reddened with the words as he tried to avert his melancholy gaze to the ground.

Kurosaki Isshin wasn't going to allow that right now, though. He light-but-firmly gripped the boy's chin and forced him to look him in eye. It reminded him of having to scold Ichigo when he was a child, especially the desperate expression that so badly wanted to escape that dawned the teenager's features. "I know this is hard for you. It is for all of your friends. Maybe tellin' your old man something will make you feel better, hm?" he suggested.

The redhead sighed and closed his eyes. "Dad, I really don't _want_ to talk about this. What's done is done; nobody can change that now."

"Well, then why does the rain remind you of your friend?" Isshin asked.

Ichigo's face drooped. "I don't feel like--"

"Come on, boy. Just get out with it. Now you're starting to make _me _upset," Isshin pouted slightly at Ichigo and huffed.

"Fine!" the teenager snapped, a little of his normal spunk returning to his voice, "It's just that… The rain feels so cold against my skin, but… it would be weird to have life without the rain, wouldn't it? There wouldn't even be life anymore. Just hearing the raindrops makes me tense in the first place, too, even though I know that the rain itself is harmless. Sorry, Dad, I just _don't _feel like sharing these thoughts with you. They sound so…" Ichigo trailed off and decided it was best to let his father fill in the blank for himself. Personally, he thought they sounded gay.

"It's alright, Ichigo. I felt the same way after your mother died," Isshin answered honestly and nodded slightly at his distraught young son.

The teenager wanted to retort because his father's answer implied some fairly scandalous relations, but he decided better of it. After all, if nobody had known, they probably didn't care or worry about it now. "I'm going to go… inside," Ichigo swallowed a lump in his throat and shoved past his father somewhat rudely, especially to not apologize, but now all he wanted was to see the one who had shunned him. It stung at the very core of his soul, at every inch of his body, and every thought that floated through his mind.

He soon found himself at the door of the room. If he could recall correctly, it was called a visitation room, but that wasn't what he cared about right now. It was at least fifty feet away, but he could clearly see it--open and inhabited. The coffin was just a fancy _box _in his mind, but obviously his _acquaintance _must have found it to be much more.

The wooden tomb was painted a glistening white, and Ichigo noticed the deep blue stripe that ran down the lower half, which was closed. He assumed that the line continued on the upper half, only to be crossed by another, smaller line up towards the top to create that infamous cross that he recognized so easily. How blatant to have put something of such a supernatural origin right upon one's place of rest!

Of course, it had always been a huge part of his life, hadn't it? That was all the _acquaintance_ had ever spoken of.

Ichigo took a few hesitant steps towards it, completely oblivious to all of the people around him. It wasn't that there were actually that many, really. There were a few classmates, fewer friends, and some others that the redhead didn't know. He assumed that they were relatives or something, but on the other hand, he didn't know that the _acquaintance _even had any other relatives.

An eternity passed before he noticed he was standing directly in front of the fancy box. His amber eyes couldn't be brought up above the rim of the box though. Looking any further would mean to truly face reality, which really wasn't something he wanted to do. His hands crossed in front of his body, his head hung. Only now did he notice the sting of tears at the corners of his eyes.

_I promised that I wouldn't cry! _he thought desperately, _Please, don't let me cry. Someone save me._

"… Uryuu," he whispered despondently, forcing his eyes to peer upon the porcelain face of the former Quincy. The other teen was a sickening off-color of his true, milky skin tone, and Ichigo felt offended by that fact. His lips were too darkened by the make-up that had to have been put upon his sacred face. That made his soul burn angrily, and he was tempted to wipe the foul excuse off that created this… this _doll_.

His right hand shakily reached out and hesitantly touched one of the too-pale hands that were crossed over the boy's torso. They were chilled, completely devoid of feeling even remotely human. Ichigo wondered if that was only true to him because he had known these hands, felt them before, in the most dangerous and the most intimate situations. His larger, calloused hands squeezed the unresponsive one's of the other as he leaned towards him.

"W-Why…?" he started, the sensation of crying gushing close to his hardened exterior, "Did you _have _to leave me like this? Anything else, anything!, would have been better, you selfish Quincy _bastard_!"

_He waited a moment, expected Ishida to respond. Of course, the Quincy did not._

"You had to leave me to find you, didn't you!?" he added, his tone growing louder and more upset as he recalled the memory. It was one that, just like the death of his mother, would haunt him endlessly for the rest of his existence.

--

_Ishida had been out of school for a few days. His redheaded acquaintance simply assumed that he had fallen ill, as his reiatsu, at least what he could feel, was wavering. He knew that the Quincy had been weak for a while, anyhow, so it would have made perfect sense. Regardless, he offered to Miss Ochi to take the missed work to the other boy, and she was pleased nonetheless. It was a quiet walk to the apartment until he felt a sudden sharp increase in Ishida's spiritual pressure before it completely and totally disappeared. Only then did the soul reaper begin to run. "ISHIDA!" he cried, running up the stairs of the building and bursting into the room. Ichigo wished that it had been closer, that he had been faster, that something or somebody had been on his side at the time because the sight that befell his eyes was yet another that was bloodstained against his memories. There the dark-haired one lay, sprawled out awkwardly upon the white carpeting of his apartment, with the remnant gaping puncture of an arrow in his throat. Ichigo screamed and dropped down next to him, gingerly lifting the bloody body into his arms to hold close. "Wake up!" he snapped, "Wake up! You have a-a lot of explaining to do, Ishida!" All he noticed and heard as he glanced down at the dying teenager was a thick, putrid gurgle of blood gushing through the other's torn esophagus and a small smile flicker at the corners of the rose-petal lips. As if he had wanted to say something to Ichigo. Said soul reaper pressed his lips against those of Ishida as he felt the dying breath escape his body. Tears started to well up in his eyes in desperation as he noticed a note next to them. He shakily picked it up and read what Ishida had decided to write as the last words of his human existence._

_I never stopped loving you. All I could do was spout lies._

--

Ichigo knew the tears were going to flow now that he recalled the stomach-turning thought, so he let them fall. A couple dropped upon Ishida's cheeks as he noticed that the teenager was wearing a very high turtleneck sweater. They must have figured that nothing but his neck was destroyed in his suicide, so they could show him as long as that was hidden and reinforced so that his head could not move at all.

The soul reaper put his right hand back into his pocket and clenched the two things that he had put there. That fate-changing note was tattered and nearly destroyed already from all of the rereading and teardrops and frustration that had been forced upon it. The last thing Ichigo had decided to take was the other's cross. He knew that it was important to Ishida--probably more important than their love had ever been, really--but it was the only memorial that he knew had much meaning to him personally. He couldn't bear to let it go now because soon it would be the only piece of Ishida that he had left. There were no photographs of them together. There were no happy date memories or fun excursions that they had taken together. All that they had was a raw understanding of each other that they fed off of and somehow managed to grow from.

Now, without even thinking, Ichigo closed his eyes and pressed his tired lips against the dark, cold ones that Ishida had in death. He didn't like the feeling; there was no spunk or fight or passion. There was nothing.

_Nothing was what he feared the most._

And then he didn't care that everybody in that room had seen him. All he noticed was that he smudged the badly done make-up on Ishida's face. Turning sheepishly, he faced them all and whispered to the silent group of people, "… Maybe somebody should fix that."

And he inconspicuously slipped his own sheet of paper into the hands of the Quincy once they all looked away from him and his embarrassing revelation.

_And I never stopped loving you. I'll see you again soon, Ishida._

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And that is that. I'm sorry if I depressed anybody, but at the same time, I want the emotion of the story to reach you. Regardless, I hope you have found some literary enjoyment in my depressing ficlet. Read and review if you so desire, my loves.


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